The design of electrical and electronic systems or interconnects, such as wiring harnesses, for example, for implementation into vehicles, aircraft, boats, appliances, or other systems with distributed electronics, can include many different design stages or phases at different levels of abstraction. For example, some of the design phases can include a requirements phase, a functional phase, a logical phase, a physical or wiring phase, a components phase, which can include at least one of a topology section, a harness section, or the like, a formboard or manufacturing phase, and a service phase.
The traversal these various design phases utilizing design tools can allow for the design of the wiring harnesses. For example, a logical design of the wiring harness can be converted into one or more physical designs of the wiring harness utilizing a wiring synthesis tool, which can generate wires for the physical designs of the wiring harness from signals and their connectivity in the logical design of the wire harness. Typically, the wiring synthesis tool can receive the logical design of the wire harness and designer guidance in the form of constraints, and synthesize the signals in the logical design of the wire harness into wires for the physical designs of the wire harness based on the constraints. Often, however, the constraints available to the designer are insufficient to control the wiring synthesis tool to implement some portions of the physical design of the wire harness. Many wiring synthesis tools or their vendors supply designers with an editing tool, which can allow the designers the ability to manually alter the physical design of the wire harness synthesized by the wiring synthesis tool. While the editing tool can allow designers to ultimately generate a desired physical design of the wire harness, the manual editing or alteration can be time-consuming. Further, since, practically speaking, a majority of the design activity involves adjustment to existing wiring harness designs, each time the logical design of the wire harness has to be modified and re-synthesized, the designers have to re-perform the manual editing or alteration of the synthesized wiring harness.